Quote:
Originally Posted by
sepiashimmer
Why?
It's just the only conclusion I can come to after spending years wondering why it's so damn hard to secure a manageable life and dignified dealings with banks, workplaces, or businesses as civilians/consumers. I know past generations did. I'm about to speak broadly here, so don't anyone get offended.
As a business, your prime driver is to extract wealth from consumers and be as good at it as you can possibly be. But businesses are not really taught to enrich the consumer, or at least maybe businessmen quickly forget the purpose of enriching the consumer once they're working. Either way, we can pretty easily establish that they're not doing it. They see it as not being their responsibility, and mostly I think that's fair as long as there's a morality check being done by someone
properly.
Unfortunately, "buyer beware" has become really difficult since we're not all lawyers, engineers, programmers, or whatever else is required to be a cautious civilian
and consumer
and worker these days. These are all the things we need to be good at to keep things running smoothly, and I'm pretty sure that fact is lost on absolutely everyone 99% of the time.
Most of us are just nothings and can't handle the trouble of thinking about what we really should be doing. That, or we flatly don't care / don't want to care. So either way, most of us fall into the category of willful ignorance when it comes to being a consumer. We want consumerism to be about straight indulgence and seek to avoid elements of responsibility.
Meanwhile, even the richest individuals in business seem to think so desperately that they can't see passed their own individual climb; total amorality. So if they give us the illusion of not needing to pay much, but not needing to pay now.. great. If they trick us into selling our privacy to get a better phone, great. If they can find a mechanism to keep us paying for the same thing over and over and over again, perfect. If anyone asks, it can probably be reasoned that it was totally necessary for the long term business model.
I mean, all of these things are broad and can't be quantified but I'll leave it up to you guys to determine whether or not I'm stretching on this. It's kind of offensive to say that consumers don't deserve respect, but I think there's a good argument to be made for it.
So in a nutsehll, we suck at putting the big picture together, and if that job is left to us we seem to just go nuts and blame each other. We've sold our privacy, our dignity in the workforce, our concept of ownership, and even our capacity for ingenuity, albeit indirectly. People who fall into this category are the most reliable customers because they just can't help themselves, and as long as they have wealth you can get it from them. I fall into this category myself for one pretty simple reason: I hate my job and I'm in debt. These are simple qualifiers, even if I'm not particularly stressed about it. They're deceptively common qualifiers too, but it's enough to place me into that category and I'm beginning to recognize that it's actually quite the task to take myself out of this category.
I mean, the category is totally made up so I can just forget about it and go about my daily life in relative happiness. But it does nag a bit, when you think about how stupid it would be for all of society to go down this road. And I mean, we are.
The businessmen who have a problem exploiting us for being stupid will quickly be replaced by the ones who can do it without batting an eye. Another simple truth that doesn't seem to bother us. We could blame government, but honestly they seem fine with it or maybe they're just as inept as we are. It's hard to really tell, and it doesn't really matter in the long run anyway.
Lol I could go on forever about this. Can't find nearly as many reasons to respect consumers -- not ones that any serious businessman or politician would actually put into practice. Maybe recent civil unrest will change their minds about the urgency of the many issues, but who knows if they can even wrap their heads around it from where they are.